Christmas Advent Countdown

It's December 1...along with my man's birthday celebration (post on that later) we started our first year of doing an advent calendar. My girlfriend is doing a book advent calendar with her boys and while I loved the idea, I didn't get my game together in time. Then I saw this idea with stockings and planned to do that, but couldn't find little stockings at a reasonable price like she did. And being too cheap to purchase a $30-40 actual boxed advent thing I made up my own system with a $5 craft kit from Target :)

So now every night, MJD leaves the "Elf Workshop" on the kitchen table next to his small tree and if Theodore (his elf) goes back and tells Santa MJD was a good boy then he'll deposit a small surprise inside the box.

Our first surprise of the season was Barrel of Monkeys :)

(Aside from the fact that the concept of time to a 4 year old is crazy hard to teach, another reason I love this whole countdown system is because I have picked up little goodies throughout the year on clearance and last year I wrapped every little thing so he'd have a ton of things to open Christmas morning. While it was fun I felt like the fun of the items got lost in the overwhelming mass of little things. So this way he can get little things all month for being good and then his big item on Christmas morning. He can slowly enjoy the treats and items. And today's item was certainly by far the most expensive and biggest treat. Some days he gets fruit snacks or jelly beans.)